The Alleged Meeting in Prague Between Mohamed Atta and the Iraqi Consul
Original article in Italian
On October 20, 2001, the New York Times published an article denying that there was evidence of a meeting between Atta and an Iraqi government official in Prague, citing Czech Interior Minister Stanislav Gross and MP Petr Nečas as sources. However, one week later the same newspaper reported that Gross himself had stated at a press conference that Atta met al-Ani in the Czech capital on April 8, 2001, and that the consul had subsequently been expelled for conducting activities unrelated to his diplomatic mandate. It later emerged that the suspicious activity carried out by al-Ani concerned the planning of an attack against the Prague headquarters of the American radio broadcaster Radio Free Europe, which at the time was located in the former Federal Assembly building.
On December 9, 2001, Dick Cheney confirmed in an interview on the television program Meet The Press that the government believed Atta had been in Prague in April and had met an Iraqi government representative there (notably, Cheney referred to Czechoslovakia rather than the Czech Republic, committing a historical error that was as striking as it was unjustifiable). The Bush administration later used the alleged meeting between Atta and al-Ani as one of the pretexts to justify the invasion of Iraq.
In reality, despite Cheney’s apparent certainty, the claim that Atta met al-Ani remained entirely anecdotal. Throughout 2002, a series of journalistic investigations reached widely differing conclusions. On May 15, the Washington Post wrote that the Czech prime minister and president had cast doubt on Gross’s statements, arguing that there was no certainty the meeting had occurred and that, even if it had, the discussion concerned a terrorist attack planned in Prague rather than the 9/11 attacks. On June 5, The Prague Post instead reported statements by Czech UN envoy Hynek Kmoníček claiming the meeting did take place.
On October 20, a new New York Times article reported that Czech President Vaclav Havel had officially informed the White House that there was no evidence of a meeting in Prague between Atta and al-Ani. Two days later, however, a spokesman for President Havel denied the report, claiming the story had been fabricated.
Alongside journalistic inquiries, numerous official investigations were conducted. As reported in Ron Suskind’s 2006 book The One Percent Doctrine, on September 19, 2001 Dick Cheney asked then–CIA Director George Tenet to investigate the matter. Tenet replied two days later, informing the vice president that the CIA’s Prague office was highly skeptical that Atta had met al-Ani there: phone records and credit card transactions indicated that Atta was in the United States at the time. The CIA report Iraqi Support for Terrorism (January 2003) likewise noted serious doubts that such a meeting had occurred. Tenet himself later confirmed before the Senate Armed Services Committee that, while it could not be ruled out with absolute certainty, the CIA considered it highly unlikely that Atta had met al-Ani in Prague.
The FBI conducted a similar investigation and reached the same conclusion as the CIA: after reviewing all of Atta’s activities during that period, there was no reason to believe he had left the United States in April 2001.
The 9/11 Commission also examined the issue. In the 9/11 Commission Report, a dedicated section explained that the claims about the alleged meeting were based on a single Czech intelligence source, while the Commission’s investigation concluded that Atta was in the United States during that week. The Commission added that if Atta had traveled to Prague at that time, he would have needed to do so under a false identity — something the hijacker had never done on any other occasion.
Czech police and intelligence services also investigated the matter, and as early as December 2001 the national police chief denied that there was evidence of a meeting between the two men. The Telegraph article reporting this added an important detail that may explain the misunderstanding: a member of Prague’s Arab community claimed to have repeatedly seen al-Ani with an Iraqi car dealer — who had sold him vehicles — and who closely resembled Atta. The anonymous Czech intelligence informant may therefore have mistaken the car dealer for the terrorist. In August 2002, the head of Czech foreign intelligence also confirmed that there was no evidence of the meeting and that the hypothesis was extremely implausible. In 2014, the former head of domestic intelligence revealed in his autobiography another crucial detail: according to his account, the United States pressured the Czech government to confirm the Prague meeting between Atta and the consul in order to justify the invasion of Iraq.
Beyond the resemblance to the car dealer, another event may have contributed to the confusion. Mohamed Atta first entered the United States on June 3, 2000, on a flight originating from Prague. Some initial investigations suggested that Atta had attempted to enter Prague on May 30 from Bonn but was turned away due to lacking a visa; he allegedly took a bus on June 1 and then entered the Czech Republic successfully. This detail led some to believe that Atta was in a hurry to enter the country — perhaps to meet someone — to the point that he could not wait even one day to regularize his visa status. In reality, this too was a misunderstanding: as explained by the Chicago Tribune in 2004, the man who attempted to enter Prague without a visa was not the terrorist Mohamed Atta but a Pakistani businessman named Mohammed Atta (with an extra “m” in the first name). Curiously, in some journalistic reconstructions Mohamed Atta was also confused with another near namesake, the terrorist Mahmoud Mahmoud Atta.
Al-Ani was taken into U.S. custody in July 2003 and in December of that year confirmed that he had never met Mohamed Atta. The New York Times article reporting his statement also included notable denials from Abu Zubaydah (an al-Qaeda militant) and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (the organizer of 9/11), both of whom confirmed that al-Qaeda had no ties to Saddam Hussein’s regime.
In 2006, Dick Cheney publicly admitted that it had been a mistake. In an interview, he stated that the source of the information was unreliable and that the most obvious conclusion was that the Prague meeting had never taken place (once again referring to Czechoslovakia instead of the Czech Republic). That same year Cheney repeated on Meet The Press that there was no evidence Atta had met Iraqi officials in Prague and that the claim had been based on mistaken identity.
In September 2006, the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence published the second version of its Iraq report. The document included a specific paragraph titled Muhammad Atta Meeting with IIS in Prague, reiterating that the only source reporting the meeting was a single witness connected to Czech intelligence, while CIA and FBI investigations found no corroboration. Much of the chapter, however, remains classified. A Newsweek investigation that same month, citing anonymous informants, suggested that the classified section concerned disagreements between the CIA and the White House: presidential staff reportedly wished to continue emphasizing the claim publicly — even including it in a Bush speech in March 2003 — while the agency objected because the allegation lacked supporting evidence. The same Newsweek article also reported CIA spokesman Paul Gimigliano’s denial that the classification served to protect the White House.
The full contours of the affair remain unclear to this day. It is certain that no links existed between al-Qaeda and Iraq, making it extremely unlikely that Mohamed Atta ever met a representative of Saddam Hussein’s government. However, the attempts by the U.S. government to promote this improbable theory remain difficult to explain, especially considering that it was used as one of the justifications for the 2003 Iraq War.
The Habbush memo: The Fabricated Document Purporting to Prove Links Between al Qaeda and Iraq
Original article in Italian
The note, dated July 1, 2001, stated that Mohamed Atta had participated in training in Baghdad during the summer of 2001 (therefore, reasonably, only days before the memo itself was written), conducted by the well-known Palestinian terrorist Abu Nidal (organizer, among other attacks, of the assault on the check-in counters of TWA and El Al airlines at the Vienna and Rome airports on December 27, 1985). In the text, al-Tikriti praised Atta’s dedication and his leadership qualities as head of the group tasked with destroying important targets.
The second part of the document also mentioned a shipment of uranium that Iraq had allegedly received by ship from Niger, implicitly referring to Saddam Hussein’s supposed nuclear weapons program — an issue President George Bush had mentioned in his 2003 State of the Union address. The letter became known as the Habbush memo, after its alleged author.
A second article in the same newspaper, again written by Coughlin — also author of the 2002 biography Saddam: King of Terror — provided further details about the letter along with the journalist’s commentary asserting that the document proved the existence of links between Saddam Hussein’s regime and the 9/11 hijackers, and that the Iraqi government was pursuing a program to produce weapons of mass destruction.
The article also mentioned a previous discovery of documents at Iraqi intelligence headquarters in Baghdad allegedly referring to a 1998 meeting in Iraq between an al-Qaeda envoy and Iraqi government officials. The meeting was reportedly successful to the point that Osama bin Laden himself was planning a visit to Saddam Hussein’s state.
Interviewed on the television program Meet The Press on the same day the first article was published, Coughlin stated that he had received al-Tikriti’s letter from a member of the Iraqi interim government, whose identity he did not disclose. He added that the document had been authenticated and that the handwriting matched al-Tikriti’s — a stronger claim than in the Telegraph articles themselves, where he had been more cautious, noting that it was not possible to state with certainty that the document was authentic.
A few days after publication of the two articles, the American weekly Newsweek published a piece by Michael Isikoff raising reasonable doubts about the memo and its contents. First, the article noted that the FBI had carefully reconstructed Atta’s movements and determined that during the period when the Baghdad training allegedly occurred, the terrorist was in the United States. Moreover, even the Iraqi National Congress — an opposition political organization founded in 1992 with support from the U.S. administration and long supportive of claims linking Saddam Hussein to al-Qaeda — expressed serious doubts about the authenticity of the letter. Isikoff also asked Coughlin directly about the memo’s authenticity, but the British journalist replied that his newspaper had no way of verifying the document.
Another investigation into the Habbush memo was conducted by journalist Ron Suskind in his book The Way of the World, published on August 5, 2008. According to Suskind, the letter was a forgery deliberately produced by the CIA and the White House. He wrote that the CIA had initially intended to have Habbush himself write the letter, but that he refused; following this refusal, the agency allegedly decided to fabricate the document. Suskind cited CIA officials Robert Richer and George Tenet, as well as MI6’s Nigel Inkster, as sources. All three later denied having made the statements attributed to them in Suskind’s book.
Tenet acknowledged that the Bush administration had pressured the CIA to portray links between al-Qaeda and Iraq as stronger than supported by available evidence, but he denied that the agency had deliberately created a forged document. The CIA also issued a public and official statement denying that it had received any request to fabricate the memo.
Nigel Inkster also returned to the subject, confirming that he had spoken with Suskind but stating that he had told the journalist he was not in a position to comment on the Habbush memo because he lacked detailed knowledge of the matter.
Two days after publicity surrounding Suskind’s book, Philip Giraldi — a former CIA counterterrorism officer — wrote in an article for The American Conservative that some of his sources confirmed Suskind’s claim that the White House had ordered the creation of a forged memo. However, Suskind was allegedly mistaken regarding who carried out the forgery: according to Giraldi, it was not commissioned to the CIA but to the Office of Special Plans, a Pentagon unit that existed for only ten months and was tasked with supplying raw intelligence on Iraq to the President. At the time, it was directed by Douglas Feith, who in 2003 also served as Under Secretary of Defense for Policy.
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| Ayad Allawi |
About ten days after Suskind’s book was published, Coughlin himself returned to the issue with an article strongly critical of Suskind, confirming that Allawi had indeed been the source who handed him the document but stating that their meeting had taken place in Baghdad in November 2003. In the article, Coughlin firmly reiterated that the CIA had played no role in producing the memo.
At the same time, the chairman of the United States House Judiciary Committee — the body within the House of Representatives responsible for oversight of the administration of justice — announced that he had tasked his staff with investigating the claims advanced by Ron Suskind as part of a broader inquiry into alleged abuses by the Bush administration, particularly regarding the push for a preventive war against Saddam Hussein’s regime. Concerning the Habbush memo, however, the committee ultimately concluded that although the document appeared to be a forgery, it was not possible to determine who had commissioned it.
To this day, the contours of this affair remain highly unclear. It is unknown who created the memo, under what circumstances, or for what purpose. The respective roles of the White House and the CIA also remain uncertain. This too belongs among the gray areas surrounding 9/11 — areas entirely unrelated to the nonsense repeated by conspiracy theorists for more than two decades.
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